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How much do you really need?
Over the years I have been playing with a vps or server I have learned to tweak things and get the most out of my hardware, even when I had my own companies.
A item I am always seeing is "I need 8/16 GB of RAM " for my personal website. I have to ask what in the world are you doing? How much traffic are you getting? Now please I am talking about a "normal" website, not a torrent host, spam bot, things like that, but a general site that you could host on a shared hosting server if not a little more.
I ask as I have a Core2Duo that I currently use as my "test bench" to install and test things.
Currently I have Ubuntu 20 installed and it is screaming along.
As you can see its using all of 367 MB of ram, running a full OpenLiteSpeed, MariaDB, PHP setup.
I don't use Yabs as my is it good, or do I want this, but I want to know how well my site will load. So I setup test sites, with a default Wordpress install with a General theme. I do this a Wordpress runs what 60% of the worlds websites? So its a great test.
Now from there I run AB against it and see my results.
As you can see I was able to pull just shy of 300/req/sec
Doing some simple math.
300/req/sec
18,000/req/min
1,080,000/req/hour
25,920,00/req/day
I have to ask, how many of you get this kind of traffic that you warrent such spec'd out vps's?
If you do do you really run your business on a $2/month account?
I only ask, as while I 110% see and I used this market for some personal stuff, I just wonder what the demand for such high spec'd systems are now.
Thoughts? Thanks
Comments
I need high specs for some stuff. It’s very rarely the web server being the bottleneck though. More so all the things around it or under the hood.
Most time I’ve spent optimizing stuff to even work on what you’d call high specced systems, I’ve spent optimizing databases, their memory caches/indexes and queries to them.
Serving a HTML document (even if it’s processed by uncached PHP) is comparatively fast in most SaaS websites compared to everything else they run.
Awhile back (when I had a bit more free time) @Not_Oles asked a similar question in a group chat. At his urging, I spun up a 512MB Debian VM and installed full normal Wordpress stack and threw a fairly moderate-to-heavy theme on it. If I recall it was 1 core, too (would have been E5-2680v4 or similar).
Managed to do fine up to ~300-400 req/s before it would choke out. Concurrent user load test limit was routinely hit @ 370-400.
That being said, that was just a simple pretty barebones wordpress site w/theme and like 2-3 plugins. You could probably make it more efficient, but it also depends on what you plan to do. Serving simple static content? You don't need more. I just don't think the actual web server is usually the bottleneck these days.
@crunchbits Additionally, for small businesses, say a company with 10 employees, upgrading the VPS is often cheaper (and less annoying) compared to finding someone that can look into why stuff isn’t working and realize that the logs are filling up the disk..
Hardware becoming cheap has led to huge resource wasting, but when you think about it, if fixing the resource wasting would cost more resources, is it even a waste to ’waste’ hardware resources?
@emgh I 100% agree, I guess my thoughts are more of the "hobby" or "personal" what I feel is the use case here with the "Low End Market" read $1/$2/month. I don't feel that or at least I would hope that people don't run their business off of such vps's. I also agree with your logs filling up the disk. Many times people don't look at those items as well.
@crunchbits I agree, I have an Atom C2350 with 4GB that I have for image hosting, and nothing more so no php,mysql,logs,email, just static content, and I can break 2000/req/sec with it using Caddy with a pretty low load level.
I think in the end as @emgh said, sometimes its just easier to throw more money/resources at things then actually try and fix them.
Thanks.
Game servers are a common use case for a lot of ram.
Otherwise I generally agree. It's fair to mention though that unused ram is wasted ram and thus your operating system will automatically use it as much as possible to cache things such as hard drive accesses. Because of this running tight on ram can be a performance bottleneck. The memory usage in
screenfetchonly includes memory directly allocated for processes, you can view the OS cache size withfree -hunderbuff/cache.i am using nginx reverse proxy. without proxy my vps load become around 50-60% idle. but when i use reverse proxy, both vps become over 95% idle.
Yes, that's right. I don't remember all the details exactly, but @crunchbits did succeed in convincing me that a 512 MB VPS could accomplish a non-trivial Wordpress load. I was surprised!
The technical side is far from being the most expensive ... With 5 VPS, 7 third-party services (Bunny CDN, Hetrix, MxRoute, etc.) My annual budget is less than €500/year ... And there are a number of free services that make it easy to start up a business. The real investment is the time and effort involved ...
My guy is single handidly hosting all of swedens sexshops gov infra
That’s right
Yeah, I agree. People seem hooked on resources that they don’t need in certain cases. Maybe more so in the personal/hobby sphere.. Maybe it’s because resources are easer to quantity compared to ”how serious is this provider?” or other important considerations?
Also, YABS is a big part of it I bet. Even if a multi core score of 1700 has worked perfectly for a long time, when you visit LET and see people paying the same or less for a larger number, you might feel like getting more resorces is needed.
I see threads often that start along the lines of ”I’m paying next to nothing and I’m very satisfied but can I get more for my $?”
I used to have the same doubt.
Until this year I found that I really needed a faster CPU. I am running an translation API and the CPU power makes significant difference for requesting speed.
My product, though has not many users, is been around for around15 years and the mysql database grows sizable. I obviously need more RAM than 500mb.
And some providers oversell so much and their cheapest VPS is even slow and laggy when logging in using SSH.
A customer of mine runs a multisite Wordpress on a vps with 512MB of ram. It's 10-12 sites, maybe peaks at 3000 hits a day in total. It just works, never had a problem with it. I help them migrate to the latest Wordpress version every now and then, but that's the only maintenance it gets.
People often vastly overestimate what they "need" and underestimate what a simple little linux vps can actually do.
If you're doing any in memory caching you're obviously going to use a decent chunk of ram. Anything running on the JVM tends to consume a decent chunk also.
Running a basically idle teamcity instance on one of my machines consumes 2gb of memory without me even doing anything.
I can agree with all points made, I love the $ex, I mean gov infa, and all on a $7 setup! :-)
I also agree with the "well I am paying X, can I get more for the same X. " Makes complete sense, as I personally buy a new car every few years, do I need it, no, do I want it yes.
I also think as @commercial stated, and I agree with several different services, you can and many do create successful businesses, and really for $550 that truly isn't bad for a solid business.
I agree with things like game servers and such, I guess in the end I am just wondering the need vs want idea, and I know I shot myself in the foot with my car statement, but still I just wonder, and lets be real, my F350 payment is a far cry from the $2/month payment I am referencing with this post., but for a basic car that gets me to work and the store a Kia Rio would work just as well. As I shoot myself even more.
Thanks
your definition of great test is alien
under usage it's supposed to be far far beyond 367 Mb. a default wordpress install barely has any content. you're likely benchmarking the cache. ofc u can serve billions of requests to static content from vintage
it's normal for servers to have terabytes of ram and many cores. having a small piece of that is cost effective. many software is feature rich and/or big data oriented and comes with lots of comfort.
Totally agree with your points, and the vast majority of my services are running on $1-2 LET Specials, but...
I'm really squeezing the margins with 16-20GB (DDR4/5) and 6-8 Epyc vCPUs to run Ollama 7b Q5 Large Language Models, (CPU-only). I'm getting acceptable inference speed/quality, although half the RAM, (~10GB), and more vCPUs, (maybe 12?), would be ideal*
*Obviously a GPU would be better, but this is LET and I've actually got these things running pretty well for €10-15 a month each 🙃
@lowenduser1 MIght be alien, but personally what I have been used to is Wordpress, so respectfully I am using this as a base model.
I do agree on the ram usage, and billions of hits and such, I don't feel my thoughts here are really directed at such a site, but more of a smaller to medium sized site, not massive sites like Pornhub or such. * you get my reference.
@CloudHopper I 100% agree with you as well, I guess my point was more inline to a "general" site, I feel that many of users here run blogesk style sites here, again I am assuming and we all know that that means. I don't know maybe I guess I am used to smaller sites that I have hosted over the years that get under 1 million hits a month and that I think is my baseline. Again I might be completely wrong, and I do know that it really depends on poorly written code, bad pluggins, the number of pluggins, and more. I would be very interested to see what others squeezed out of their vps's and the specs. Just from a see what I can see idea.
Thanks!
Let's not forget where we came from:
https://lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-sites-on-a-64mb-link-1-vps/
@raindog308 See!!!
thanks for pointing that out, was a great read.
duh, nanokvm.net still runs on 512MB since 2018.
for people do local marketing (not based on LE*), their free plan is enough
or 25$/m